According to Alexa, Forex Factory has broken into the 1,000 most-trafficked websites in the world!

There's no telling if we'll stay here, but we're excited to have reached this mark for the first time. To all the traders who got us this far: your loyalty is greatly appreciated, and will be reciprocated with a continued commitment to supporting your pursuit of profits.

To the best of our knowledge, Forex Factory is the first forex-related website to break the top 1,000, so this milestone says as much about Forex Factory as it does the forex industry as a whole. Given the recent IPO and M&A trends, all signals point to an industry that's bigger and stronger than ever.

Btw, we recognize that Alexa rank is an imperfect metric. Nonetheless, it's arguably the most credible grading system for worldwide traffic and tends to be the most widely-quoted benchmark.

Forex Factory is still growing after almost ten years! We're sitting at all-time highs in every key metric, and our team has never been stronger!

We just completed construction on our new development center in Tampa, and we're looking to staff it with the best web engineers in the city. If you're a top-notch LAMP developer who wants to work for a product-focused company, we encourage you to apply for the Website Engineer position.



We're also seeking a sales professional with Internet advertising experience. Forex Factory sells display advertising directly to a worldwide customer base, so the position requires significant international travel to meet customers' needs. Please apply for the Account Representative position if this sounds like the right position for you.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us.

We hope you've been finding the new member profiles useful! Many thanks to those who provided feedback and reported bugs!

With the kinks now worked out, we've turned our attention to adding features and functionality to the profiles. The first major addition is 'member subscribing' – you can now subscribe to a member, just like you would subscribe to a thread or story.



This new functionality brings about several changes that may have you scratching your head without some explanation...

1. 'Buddies' are now mutually-subscribed members
Previously, buddy status was fairly inconsequential – you could add anyone to your buddy list without much effect. With the new system, however, a buddy relationship is automatically established when two members are subscribed to each other. Buddies can no longer be manually added; they only come from mutual subscriptions.

2. Old buddies have been converted into subscriptions
Most traders used the old buddy system to keep track of certain members. Since subscribing to a member has a similar intention, all old buddies have been converted into subscriptions to initially populate the new system. If any of your old buddies also had you on their buddy list, they will remain your buddy because the conversions will result in a mutual subscription (which results in a buddy relationship, as discussed above). The email alert for converted subscriptions was set to 'None', so you won't receive email alerts from these subscriptions unless you change the settings.

3. Vouching was separated from the Network block
You'll notice the Network block now lists 'Buddies', 'Subscribers', 'Subscriptions', and 'Ignored'. The 'Vouchers' and 'Vouched For' sections have been moved to a separate block below the Network block. The motivation for doing this can't be explained without shedding some light on our future plans. In short, vouching will be phased out in the future, and replaced with a system that's based on the number of subscribers a member has. Separating vouchers from the Network block will make for a cleaner transition to the new system in the future.

4. Vouched-for members have been added as subscriptions
Anyone you previously vouched for has been added as a subscription. Since vouching will eventually be phased out, as discussed above, we want to carry the spirit of historic vouchers to the new subscription system. By duplicating your vouch as a subscription, the spirit of the vouch is not lost and will be carried into the coming subscription-based system that will replace the vouching system. To illustrate, a member who had 50 vouchers in the past will now have 50 subscribers, so when the vouching system is replaced they will still be highly "ranked."

While the current state of member subscribing is transitional, you should find the new functionality very useful for keeping track of content produced by traders you respect. Gone are the days of visiting countless profiles to see what traders are doing – it's now all in one place and easy to manage.

Please contact us if you're confused about any of the changes or have feedback. We carefully consider all feedback!

If you tried to access the site in the past 24 hours you probably experienced broken applications and intermittent downtime. We're extremely sorry for the problems! Reliability is one of the primary objectives at Forex Factory, and we fell way short here.

As for the cause, we were upgrading a load balancer and it set off an unbelievable string of problems for our internal network. The root cause was so obscure that it took our development team, along with several Rackspace engineers, working 20 hours straight to identify. It ended up being the longest non-hacker-related downtime we've experienced in over seven years. Sigh.

You can be sure we'll be working hard to improve our reliability in the future. We learned a lot from this experience and will use it to make us better.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

Over the past few months you may have noticed the Forums undergoing an extensive interface redesign. This week we rolled out the last of the major upgrades.

There were hundreds of changes made, and together they result in a product that's simpler, faster to navigate, and more visually focused on content. Enhancements like the new thread pagination represent a breakthrough in navigation speed, and improvements like the new file uploading sequence, which turned a clunky 7-click process into a snappy 3-click process, make interfacing with the site much easier.





Another notable upgrade was the implementation of a new post editor, which will likely be celebrated by Chrome users since the old editor couldn't visually display BB code. And if you've ever found it difficult to browse a thread's attachments, you're going to like the new tabulated attachment display.





We hope you like the new design! Please contact us if you encounter any bugs or have feedback – we love to hear from you!